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Through the smoke Casper saw somebody stumbling about inventing a fire extinguisher, but there was no response.
“Turn it off!” Casper shouted. “Turn–” but his lungs filled with smoke and he bent double, coughing. He longed for fresh air, for a cool breeze, for a friend who didn’t burn things down all the time.
Then… SPRUNGG!
Something popped up. The cacophony ceased, the flames died and the smoke began to thin. Through Casper’s watery eyes he could see Lamp plucking something from the toaster’s tray and blowing it out with sharp puffs. Little cinders still burnt at the corners, so he threw it to the floor and gave it a good stamp.
“You can have that slice,” said Casper, straightening up and rubbing the ash from his eyes. “Not a big fan of stamped toast.”
Lamp picked it up and gasped. “But, Casper, this isn’t toast!”
“More like charcoal.”
“No, no, look. This is writing! It says…” He scratched his nose, leaving a black smudge. “Casper, can I read?”
“Not often, no. Give it here.”
The oily boy was right. He held out a charred strip of paper, yellow and curled and peppered with cinder holes. Most of the blackened bottom half melted away into ash as Casper took it, but some words at the top were still visible through the soot. A title, an author and a date.
Casper’s brain twisted the wrong way up. “What? But…” He read the paper again. And again. He rubbed his eyes. He looked at the date, and the name, and the title. Then he pinched himself. He asked Lamp to pinch him. He asked Lamp to punch him. He asked Lamp to stop punching him now, because six times was quite enough.
“What’s it say, then?”
Whichever way Casper read the paper, the words written on it were impossible. Firstly, it seemed to be an article written… written… by Lamp. This in itself was beyond belief. Only once in his life had Lamp spelt a word correctly. (He wrote ‘fish’, which is more of an achievement when you don’t know that it took him a week and he was trying to spell the word ‘the’.)
But more importantly, the date said 18 November 2112. That would make Lamp 111 years old when he wrote it. Now, Betty Woons was 107 and going strong, but she didn’t get blown up nearly as often as Lamp. And anyway, Betty was probably lying about her age. She’d been 107 for as long as Casper had known her. Sure, she was old, but in all likelihood she’d lost count at around 80 and just picked her favourite number.
And even if Lamp had grown to 111 years old and learnt to write, why would he discredit his own time machine, of all things? It was Lamp’s ultimate goal! With this toaster he was halfway there! Why ever would he criticise something like that?
“I think your machine’s broken, Lamp.”
“Can’t be. If it was broken then this light would come on.” He pointed to a green bottle cap on the top of the alarm clock marked BROKKIN.
“But this is written by you, in the future, and it says the Time Toaster should never have been invented.”
“Don’t be silly,” chuckled Lamp. “I can’t write.”
“Well, that’s what I thought.”
“So what’s that writing mean, then?”
“I haven’t a clue.” Casper chewed his lip, but that didn’t help at all.
Lamp thought for a minute, then snorted. “We should go and find out!”
“To the future?” Casper’s heart beat faster. “But how?”
“All we’ve got to do is climb into the Time Toaster. Then the me in the future will pull the switch.” Lamp was already trying to force his foot into the tray. “Gimme a push, Casper.”
“Lamp, you’ll never fit!” Casper gave his friend a shove, but his toes barely passed the lip of the toaster. “You’re just not toast-shaped.”
“I could be,” Lamp piped up. “As long as I bring some glue with me, I could travel in slices.”
“Not sure that’s wise.”
“But I want to go time travelling, Casper! I could be a knight, and a spaceman, and – ooh! – I could be a postman!”
“You could be a postman now.”
“Not a proper postman, Casper. In the olden days they rode horses and fired guns at deserts.”
“That’s a cowboy.”
A gasp came from the garage doorway.
Both boys spun round and one squeaked. There stood Anemonie Blight, her greedy eyes wide. She pointed a black-nailed finger at the Time Toaster. “Wassat, then?”
“Nothing,” snapped Casper. “Go away.”
“Not until you tell me what it does,” the girl smirked. “Fly, does it? Will it do yer homework?”
“It’s not finished,” lied Casper, “and even if it was, it still wouldn’t do anything.”
“Actually –” Lamp stepped forward proudly, clasping his hands together and closing his eyes like a museum curator describing Picasso’s bogey – “it’s a time machine.”
Anemonie’s ears pricked up.
Casper’s heart leapt.
Lamp’s tummy rumbled, so he took a bite of toast.
“Time machine, is it?” Anemonie’s body had tensed, her eyebrows raised.
“No!” cried Casper. “You heard him wrong. He said… erm… prime gravel. That’s it! It makes gravel for your garden path, that’s all.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Lamp frowned. “It makes time travel.”
Casper winced. He jabbed his friend twice with an elbow, to the rhythm of Shut up, but by the look on Anemonie’s face, he knew it was too late.
“The things I could do with a time machine,” the girl murmured, inching forward with a wild look in her eyes. “Go back and buy last week’s winning lottery tickets; take a telly back in time and pretend I invented it…” She giggled. “Or I could just sell the time machine. Reckon it’s worth a hundred pounds at least.”
“A hundred pounds?” chuckled Lamp, shaking his head. “Not likely. My Time Toaster’s more valuable than all the money in all the piggy banks in all the world.”
That was enough. Pound signs flashed in Anemonie’s eyes and she launched at the boys, fingernails first.
Lamp spun protectively and grabbed the Time Toaster while Casper stepped forward to block Anemonie’s path. She deftly dodged him, leaping to one side and bouncing at Lamp. Turning away just in time, Lamp found himself holding the Time Toaster at arm’s length as Anemonie pushed into him, screaming with envy.
“Lamp! Over here!” Casper was unmarked at the entrance to the garage, and he’d played enough rugby to know this was a good thing. “Chuck it!”
Anemonie lunged, but not in time to deflect Lamp’s mighty lob as the Time Toaster soared into the air…
…and landed with a CRASH! about fifty centimetres in front of Lamp’s feet.
“You broke it.” Anemonie sneered with disdain at the crumpled heap on the floor. “How’m I gonna sell a big lump of broken metal?” With a huff, she stomped from the garage, spitting on the floor as she left.
(#ulink_64144288-dec0-527d-ba38-2eebc442553f)
Once Anemonie’s steel-toed footsteps had faded far into the distance, Casper began to pick up the shattered pieces of what used to be Lamp’s Time Toaster, and place them on the central workbench. “So… how bad is it?”
Lamp hadn’t spoken yet. In fact, he hadn’t even moved. He was still in the same stretched position as he had been when he threw the Time Toaster, like a statue of the world’s worst ballerina. Slowly, he let his arms drop and his gaze fix on the pile of scrap. At the top of the pile, a single green light was flashing: the bottle cap marked BROKKIN.
Lamp smiled weakly. “At least that bit’s still working.”
And so the boys began the painstaking task of fitting the Time Toaster’s pieces back together. Casper had to pop over to Mrs Trimble’s shop to buy two more pots of glue and a yo-yo. By the time he came back, the queue at the bus stop had mostly filtered away. Sandy Landscape, the village gardener, who’d joined at the very back, was now taking his turn to sniff the brand-new seats and knock on the glass walls. Happy all was in order, he murmured some words of approval and strolled back up the street.
Casper smiled as the muddy man passed.
“Mornin’, Casper.” Sandy Landscape doffed his floppy hat. “You ent seen me goat, ’ave yer?”
“Have you checked your goat pen?”
Sandy looked impressed. “Now that I ain’t. But I shall check there next. Thankee, Casper.” And he trotted off to look in the place where he always found his goat.
Back in the garage, Casper found Lamp doing a little jig. “What’s going on?”
“I did a clever!” Lamp wiggled his hips and waved a spanner around. “Remind me to thank Anenemy for breaking my Time Toaster.”
“Why on earth would you want to thank her?”
“I think I put it back together wrong. Now it sends stuff rather than receives it.”
“That’s good!” said Casper. “I guess. Still just toast, though…”
“Not if you don’t want toast. I can send anything!”
“As long as it fits in the toaster.”
“Not any more.” Lamp waddled across to a dark corner of his garage and returned with a tartan tin full of old biscuits. He stretched two red wires from one of the many holes still left in the Time Toaster and stuck them to the tin with two squares of tape. With a flourish of his hand and a shout of “Let’s TIME!”, Lamp tugged down on the toaster handle and the machine coughed into action.
When the smoke cleared this time, however, there was no toast. In fact, rather than anything new, something was missing. The biscuit tin, and the biscuits inside it, had completely vanished.
At first Casper thought Lamp had scoffed a secret snack under the smokescreen, but then he would have had to eat the tin too, and tins aren’t that tasty.
“Someone in caveman times is gonna have a lovely treat,” smiled Lamp.
The biscuit tin had gone. Through time. Casper found himself short of breath. “But this is… amazing! Will it send anything?”
“So far I’ve tried it with a colouring pencil, that biscuit tin and one of my shoes. I think that covers most things.”
Casper hadn’t noticed until then that one of Lamp’s sponge shoes was missing.
“All you need is a big enough container to put stuff in, and it’ll send that stuff through time! Including us!” Lamp couldn’t help but start his jig again.
“Including us? But that means…” Casper’s mind raced with the possibilities. “But this is huge!” he gasped. “Lamp, this is proper time travel, not just prehistoric toast.”
“I know!” Lamp beamed. “I’m going to go and cuddle a Viking!”
“We’ve got to be careful here.”
History was being made in this garage. Casper just wanted to make sure they knew exactly what history they were making before they blundered through time and killed Henry VIII or something. “Do you have any control over where we go?”
“Course!” said Lamp.
“And if something goes wrong we could come right back?”
“S’pose,” Lamp shrugged.
“So all we need is a big enough container. Something that can carry us both, and the Time Toaster itself, through time.”
“Yep; it’s got to be big and made of glass.”
“Why glass?”
“So we can see where we’re going.”
Casper thought for a long second. “Then I know just what we can use.”
Lamp lugged the Time Toaster under one arm. “Is it far?” he huffed.
“Just round the corner.”
One step out of Lamp’s garage and a turn to the left, and Casper could see it: Corne-on-the-Kobb’s oven-fresh bus shelter.
Glinting in the autumn sunlight like Mrs Trimble’s lost glasses, the brand-new bus shelter was the perfect vehicle for Lamp’s Time Toaster. Casper trailed down the road after Lamp, picking up the bits that fell off his friend’s invention.
“Do you really need this?” asked Casper, scooping up a party blower that had dropped out of a singed crack in the toaster’s base.
“Only if we’re having a party.” Lamp wheezed onwards, a mostly melted toothbrush rattling out of the Time Toaster as he went.
The installation was simple enough, but it took time. Lamp had to glue the Time Toaster snugly to one glass wall and feed the red wires into the timetable board. Just as he was about halfway through, the shape of a girl appeared round the corner.
“Oy!” came the ear-splitting screech of Anemonie Blight. “Wotcha doing?”
This time Casper was quick off the mark. “Don’t tell her, Lamp! Pretend it’s something else.”
“Got it,” grinned Lamp, turning to call back to Anemonie. “It’s not a time machine any more, Lemony. It’s a…” Lamp’s tummy rumbled. “Casper,” he whispered, “I can’t think of any things that aren’t time machines.”
There was a long moment of silence before Anemonie began to march towards the bus shelter.
